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All he surveys
This is aerial photography at its sexiest and gives us earth-bound folk a taste of what so amazed the first men in space. It is landscape photography at its most remarkable. Colour and form are central to the work and such colour as is unimaginable from ground level. Edmaier trained as a geologist and his images occupy that borderline between science and art that is peculiar to photography. Indeed the images taken in tandem with their explanatory texts make a sound primer in geology and environmental ecology. Earthsong is a coffee-table book in the best sense - you could screw legs to it and use it as such, it’s big enough. More than 250 images are arranged over four chapters dedicated to Earth’s natural environments of water, desert, forest and grassland, and tundra. The text, in the form of extended captions, provides identification and explanation of the phenomena on display. Much contemporary landscape photography is politicised, taking as its underlying theme ‘the hand of Man’; Edmaier’s work approaches his subject from the opposite direction, celebrating the vast expanses of our planet that have (so far) survived beyond that malign influence. Even then, the text acknowledges and explains the modifying effects of climate change on the otherwise natural forms displayed. When modern man settled and began to practise agriculture around 10,000 years ago there were maybe five to 10 million humans on the entire planet; now there are in excess of six billion. However these remain concentrated in cities and fertile regions leaving much of Earth’s 510 million square kilometres well alone. Were it not for photography like that of Bernhard Edmaier, few of us would have the visual experiences of these far-flung forms that appear to be and are, in a real sense, from another planet.
Earthsong: Aerial Photographs of our Untouched Planet, photographs by Bernhard Edmaier, text Angelika Jung-Hüttl, published by Phaidon, £35.00 (hb), ISBN 0 7148 4451 9.
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